EFFECT ON FAULT DETECTION CAPABILITY OF TEST SUITES DUE TO MINIMIZATION

Abstract

Test-suite minimization techniques attempt to reduce the time of tests, by eliminating redundant test cases from test-suites. A potential drawback of these techniques is that in minimizing a test-suite, the ability of that test-suite to reveal faults in the software might be reduced. This thesis presents a new test-suite minimization algorithm for single-entity criteria, which can be used for minimizing test suites of software written in languages that allow short-circuiting in evaluating conditional expressions. The algorithm presented in this thesis uses heuristics to minimize test-suites. These heuristics give an approximate solution to optimal test-suite minimization problem. The results show that good minimization in test-suite size can be achieved without sacrificing much fault detection capability. The proposed algorithm is implemented using MS VC+ + using MFC on Windows XP Professional The testing is done using VectorCASTIC.